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How To Identify & Crush Your Predominant Fault

In my last post I forced us all to consider our Big Kahuna of sin, our Grand Poobah of iniquity – our Predominant Fault.

It’s important because if we don’t fight it, we’re in big spiritual trouble. We’ll have no fertile interior life, which means no real spiritual growth.

So let’s turn our attention to how spiritual master Fr. Garrigou-Lagrange says we can identify, and then crush, this killer of souls.

6 Ways To Identify Your Predominant Fault

1. Ask God to show you. (Trust me…He’ll answer.) Ask for grace and then listen. And realize it might not even be God talking directly to you. Just by examining the things that pre-occupy your thoughts, especially during prayer, you can get a good bead on your major weaknesses.

Think about what issues or thoughts distract you the most when you’re trying to focus and recollect yourself. These are often strong indicators of what you need to work on because they’re items or issues that have a strong hold on your attention.

2. Ask “What makes me happy or sad?” (Add extra penance for any joyful response involving parachute pants or Zubaz.) Obviously, not everything that causes these emotions is a fault, but they can be clues.

3. Ask “What motivates my actions?” (Focus particularly my sinful motives.) Motive is huge. It’s the guard at the gate of the soul. If you can constantly monitor your motive (and be honest about it) you’ll be far better equipped to fight the spiritual battle.

Identifying your true motive will help you uncover your predominant fault very quickly.

Regardless, others are more objective than we are when it comes to our weaknesses.

5. Ask yourself “What tempts me most?” “What is my weak area?” The Devil certainly knows, and is probably squeezing that pressure point pretty often. Pinpoint it. One way to do this is to think about what you’re always bringing up in confession.

6. Finally, Fr. Lagrange says that “in moments of true fervor the inspirations of the Holy Ghost ask us for the sacrifice of this particular fault.” If God is asking you do something like this, there’s a reason. Pray for grace to do what the Lord is asking of you.

So there you go – how to discover your Predominant Fault. But as GI Joe said back in the 80s cartoon, “knowing is only half the battle.”

The remaining question is “How do we kill it?”

3 Ways To Kill The Predominant Fault

You can’t combat your predominant fault without a healthy interior life. So here are the keys:

And remember that prayer is meant to lead to action. If you’re going to ask God for it, you’ve got to act on the knowledge that he imparts. That’s the whole point of the grace he gives.

2. Examination of Conscience. Don’t just think about it. Writedown how many times you fell to this fault. It’s like listing the checks written out of your bank account.

Falling to your predominant fault is like a big withdrawal from your spiritual savings account. You have to keep track so you can make a matching deposit. How? Look at number 3.

3. Do some penance. (Or as Fr. Lagrange puts it – “Impose a sanction.”) No pain, no gain” is just as true for spiritual workouts as it is in the sweaty world of Zumba. “This penance,” says Fr. Lagrange, “may take the form of prayer, a moment of silence, an exterior or interior mortification.”

And it’s better to do your penance now, rather than later. Why? Because the penance you do now has eternal merit due to the fact you’re making an act of the will. Anything that happens in purgatory doesn’t have merit because you have to suffer one way or the other.

Regardless of form, the penance you do should be “reparation for the fault and satisfaction for the penalty due it,” says Fr. Garrigou.

In other words, make the penance match the crime. (Don’t throw yourself into an Iron Maiden for 6 months because you lost patience yet again.)

Imposing a consequence for our repeated sin helps us to think twice before doing it again.

So there you go! Put these things into motion and you’re on your way to ridding yourself of your predominant fault!

But remember, it’s going to be hard. Your predominant fault doesn’t want to be unmasked and lose its hold on your life. But if you turn to Christ to help, you can do it.

Quoting St. Augustine, the Council of Trent declared, “God never commands the impossible; but in giving us His precepts, He commands us to do what we can, and to ask for the grace to accomplish what we cannot do.” Now git-r-dun!

God bless!

Matthew

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ABOUT ME

I am an author, speaker, podcaster, Vice President and Executive Producer at the St. Paul Center for Biblical Theology. I’m married to a beautiful woman named Veronica with whom I have six children (so far…she’s 10 years younger so you never know).